Category Archives: Thoughts

My summer vacation (so-called) began in the month of May, precisely on 11th May, 2016. The reason I call this vacation ‘so-called’ is that on weekdays, I’m attending GRE classes, and also pursuing a summer internship. This year, I would be giving my GRE and TOEFL exams, so hence the classes. Classes are not tiresome, rather they are interesting, I get to read various different passages, and critically analyse them. When you have to critically analyze and carefully read an English passage, you concentrate on each sentence of the passage; moreover as everybody knows I need to know “arcane- medieval words”, so that I can appropriately answer Fill-in-the-blanks questions. Here is where I have a story to tell.

You have to elevate yourself, only that gives you enough space for achieving great things!

It is my first ever GRE English class. I’m nervous, and completely unaware of how people would be. Would they be friendly? Would the teacher be strict? Or maybe they maybe cool? I completely unaware of this. As the class begins, my English teacher announces that this particular lecture would deal with question- sentence equivalence, where i have to fill blanks with arcane and medieval English words. At about half an hour into class, my teacher is going on a neck break speed, he is bombarding us with 10-15 rare English words per question, with their respective synonyms, antonyms. I struggle to grasp each and every word. At the same time, I’m awestruck by my teacher’s vocabulary, and confidence. He literally knows the meaning of each and every word that is discussed in the questions. The confidence he exudes while teaching us is amenable and laudable. As much as I’m confused, and fascinated by my new teacher, my mind is on another level. My mind is pondering over the words my sir is telling us. Moreover, unusually a mental switch goes off, I start thinking about my personality. My mind is drifts off from the class, and the words, at the same time my mind is concurrently concentrating on the unusual words my teacher is telling us. A small voice inside my head murmurs, “Can I describe my personality with the weird words I have being taught? Is that really possible? Let’s try!!” My mind goes over the possibilities; some words emerge- cerebral, skittish, solemn, assiduous, and capricious. I’m completely ‘flabbergasted’ by my mind. It is simultaneously concentrating on what my sir is teaching and going over the words that define Me, Myself. As I properly ‘define’ myself, the class ends, and I have a childish smile on my face. I’m unusually sagacious, this is the first time a class taught me wisdom rather than knowledge

.

Let’s do this small fun activity, state the words you first spot! Those words equivocally define you!?

Well I realized that you cannot define yourself vaguely, you CAN’T be equivocal about your life’s goals. You SHOULD be very precise of what you want in life, and SHOULD work for it. Life has no rewind button, a moment lost is an opportunity gone forever, it cannot be brought back. At the same time, this definition of ‘YOU’ is quite unique. The words that define one person cannot define another person; he/she has his or her own set of words. Remembering this fact is important, and you will realize that once you define ourselves , you somehow elevate yourself from the rat race. A rat race where people compete over a limited range of words that can define many people. This is the main reason why people don’t feel satisfied even when they are successful, as they acquire words that mean NOTHING to them. Moreover, you have to seek out your words, because they are seeking you too, frantically searching and scourging for you. And when you find out these words, ‘your’ words, you will realize that they don’t define you anymore. This is what precisely brings you back to square one. You begin your journey again for the search of new words, and this is where self-discovery, complacency and self-awareness emerges.

I decided to change how my handwriting looked when I was around fifteen years old. I remember the moment vividly. One of my friends at school knew a guy who was into handwriting analysis and so she’d had her handwriting done for a laugh. I listened to the interpretation of her idiosyncratic scrawl during a morning break with great interest: a squiggle here meant this and a flourish of a certain length meant that.

We take photographs to capture memories. It helps us capture past times, times that will never return. We all feel that sense of accomplishment and excitement when we take a good photograph. But I want to ask you this one question, what is a good photograph? A photograph that truly captures the moment? Once in a while, we take such a photograph, and when we look back at it, we fell accomplished and happy. There are some photos, which not only capture the moment, but they capture the sharpness and brutality of reality. I took one such photo, when I was cycling back home. As I was cycling back home, I saw this scene, and thought to myself, “This would be an awesome scene to click”, so I stopped, parked my cycle, took out my cell phone and clicked away. What I didn’t realize at that instance was that this would be one photo that I would remember for a long time.

As you can see, there is a small house in a depression of ground, this ground is not dry, but it is partly covered by water. This made me think of the life we live. How our surroundings are a manifestation of our thoughts and perspective that we hold dear. That depression on the ground is the spectrum (range of our mind), and that lone house signifies us. If you imagine the house to be a living being, like a tree which cannot move, it doesn’t really know what is beyond the border edge. It doesn’t really realize how beautiful and wonderful this life is, it only sees what the mind reflects. The moral this photograph taught me was to never narrow down our sight rather our vision, always keep an open point of view. You can’t be like that house, you have to more than that, you have be like the trees that surround the house, ever growing, and having a broad perspective of the overall world. Ironical to what I captured, we are unfortunately like that house in depression, which is happy to see things that are directly in front of it, but completely ignorance of how vast the world is beyond the boundaries. We should always remember one thing in our life, we SHOULD not be closed minded individuals, with a rigid set of ideals, but rather we should be open for inspiration, we should have the capability to see beyond the walls that surround us. Remember, there are thousands of things to envision beyond the ordinary things right in front of you.

One year back on the occasion of Diwali, I was relaxing in my countryside home, listening to old Hindi songs on vinyl records, and now I’m freezing up in Delhi winter, feeling all the more nostalgic for my culture. To give a background check on things, I’m from Maharashtra, and currently I’m in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi about 1500 km away from home. I have to say this, this is the first Diwali I’m spending away from home and it is completely different feeling altogether. So it is obligatory for me to write a nostalgic post about celebrating Diwali away from home. I would not say celebrating but living through Diwali in a hostel.

All our adventures and journeys in the end lead to one destination- HOME!

Diwali for all Indians is like Christmas time, everybody is home, relatives and close friends visit you and you visit them, everybody enjoys sweet delicacies at each other’s houses. But for me, all I remember about spending Diwali last year, was writing an environmental-pro post on why we shouldn’t burst fire crackers and damage our own health as well as other’s sanity. Looking back at that post this year away from home, I feel different, I feel sad that I’m not with my family, and moreover I will let my anti-cracker stance slide for the moment, just for the sake of my argument. For the people of state, this festival is celebrated differently and its importance is more than any other festival, it is celebrated with much zeal and gusto.

I cherish this particular quote by William Trevor!

Looking at the culture of Delhi, rather looking at how Diwali is celebrated at Delhi, I feel like I’m not even in India, I feel like I’m displaced away from home, these celebrations in the university campus make me feel more displaced and long harder for my state and its people. Celebration in the campus should make Diwali feel homely for all outstation students, rather it alienates me more, and makes me miss my family my mom and dad back home. Today on the first day of Diwali, I suddenly realize that I’m indeed away from home , and at the same time it makes this university campus more foreign and different than usual. On regular days, I don’t feel like I’m away from home, I do know that my home is away from me, but just that I have friends here, and it reduces my longing for home to some extent. I understand today what it feels to be displaced from home and how detachment feels like.

I truly understand what it means by,

” You don’t know what you got, until its gone”

Precisely! 😉

Wish you all a happy, safe and prosperous Diwali! 🙂

P.S I’m sorry that I broke my promise for posting more articles than usual, but these days I have being caught up with more study and less free time, please forgive me for that. 🙂 😛

It was a typical Sunday afternoon, I had spent my morning studying, and was quite bored. I thought well I would watch a movie in the afternoon. For a couple of days, I always had my mind stuck on a particular movie starring Chris Helmworth, about a particular F1 race. So I went to Imbd, and found that movie- Rush. This movie is an inspirational movie, moreover it came as a surprise that I didn’t get the media attention it ought to get. The movie is a character portray of 2 F1 racers- James Hunt and Nicki Lauda, and their rivalry on and off track. This is one movie I think everyone should watch. Actually it should be watched by young adults, teenagers, and youth entering the real world. The uniqueness of this film is that though it is based on F1 racers, it shines more light on their personal lives than just fast cars and tracks. It is more of a drama film than a sports film. It taught me a couple of things that probably the 21s century would NEVER teach you- How to deal with rivalry and enmity between fellow competitors. Our 21st century teaches us to crush our enemies, so as to prove them wrong, and so as to prove that you are the strongest. On the contrary, this film taught me that there is more to enemies than just rivalry. Enemies rather competitors teach you to push onto your limits, and reach for the sky. Moreover, it highlighted the fact that enemies can make up for fake friends, it taught me that there is something more to just enmity between 2 people, there is a companionship, respect and understanding. Most importantly, this movie taught me how to take competition healthy, than just it being confined to enmity. The most heartfelt moment of the film, was its end, the monologue provided by Nicki Lauda-

“When I heard about James Hunt’s death, it didn’t surprise me, it made me sad”

Precisely! 🙂

Well even though, these racers were competitors on racing tracks, but over the years, they developed a respect and understanding for each other, their skills, and eventually had a close friendship. The character portrayal of the 2 racers- their struggles, told me that each person in this world puts everything they have into the competition, and the competition is tough, but it is up to us, the way we take this competition. It is the attitude that makes each one of us different, moreover this attitude finally leads to the development of our personality, and the way we carry ourselves in this world.

It was lazy summer Monday, as I looked at my cycle, it reminded me that its tires had less air pressure in them. I went into my balcony to fetch my air pump, and went straight towards my cycle tires. Well as we all know this, filling up air into cycle tires, is not a piece of cake, and it is quite a ‘tiresome’ process. So as to reduce my physical misery, I plugged into my Ipod, and pressed the shuffle button on it.

Coincidentally, the first song which was played on my Ipod was my favorite song – Californication by the funk rock band Red Hot Chilli pepper. It is quite a relaxing listen, and while listening to this song, I was filling up air in my tires. The lyrics of the song went on as follows –

“Psychic spies from China try to steal your mind’s elation

Little girls from Sweden dream of silver screen quotations”

The lyrics of this particular song are quite spectacular in its own ways!

This song transported me into a new dimension. It was quite unusual phenomenon, despite the song being catchy, it didn’t distract me from the primary task at hand, rather it made me concentrate more on it. As I was filling up air, the bright sun rays which were falling on my cycle suddenly dimmed, as if somebody came up from behind me and drew the curtains. Initially I thought someone came up from behind me to prank me, but to my surprise there was no there, only I was there with my pump and cycle. I ignored this phenomenon, and continued filling up air, and again suddenly there was light on me, bright sun rays again fell on me. This particular activity went on for a while, as all these interesting things kept happening, in my headphone Californication played on. For all the people who haven’t heard this song, this song basically talks about how things go about in California, rather how California is actually Hollywood and vice versa. But I like to interpret it as a song about change. How seemingly random happenings in our world, have small but certain influence on our ways and perception of things around us. The bright and dim foreplay of the sun and clouds in nature, made me think about whether somebody was standing behind me. All I’m trying to say is that we are victim of changes occurring in this brave world. These changes may not always be pertaining to us, they may be occurring on a larger scale of things such as nature, but they do have an influence on us. In short, we can consider change to be happening/ incident in our everyday life, whose casualty is us. The causality can be a positive thing for some of us, on the other hand others may not cope up well with it. The positive or negative causality of change depends upon us, and our perception of change. As I’m lost in my thoughts, suddenly my mind is distracted in the right direction towards my headphone, which still played the same song.

The lyrics now says –

” The sun may rise in the east, at least it settles in the final location”.

At that moment, I realize that the “Sun” is the change, and East and final location(West) are our perception of change.

It was 11.15pm in the night, I’m conflicted between 2 thoughts – one to write an article about a certain idea I have in my mind, and my mind telling me you are too tried to concentrate. But I gave into my former thought, and started writing an article. But this article which I had started writing was different, it had no title on it, it was blank. Well I thought to myself, whether it was right to write a title of the article, or to write on with the flow of my thoughts. This time I chose the latter, and continued to lay down my story, my ideas on paper, without giving a thought about the petty title. By giving a title an article, I would confine myself only to a particular line of thought, and not go beyond that, on the other hand without a title, I would be like a tree who spreads its roots in all possible direction, and would expand on a variety of thoughts and ideas. All these thoughts made me think of the other writers, who are also writing , are they conflicted by such trivial things, or whether they just ramble on with their ideas. But I continued writing my thoughts, well by now it had an intro, and I was thinking about how to begin writing the body of the article, when I had this bright moment of epiphany.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. sir I salute you!!

We begin our life as a small child, full of innocence and undiscovered things and habits, we don’t as a child have a particular line of thoughts, all that we are confined to is the cycle of sleep-wake-cry-eat-poop-repeat. It goes on until we are old enough to think about which particular toy we like and we want, which color we like, which sport we like. Then as years go on, our line of thoughts starts getting narrower and narrower, we start developing likes and dislikes for a particular thing, we starting putting boundaries in our world, to confine ourselves to a particular set of experiences, and become completely immune to experiences which are not particularly our jam. I don’t think we should do such an unfeasible activity, at that moment I start removing the mental fences I had put up in my mind, and allowed my mind to drift into the unexplored territories without being afraid, that I might fail. If we fail, still we win, we become wiser, and if we win, we learn to push onto our limits. I start deconfining myself, by removing those mental fences. and at that particular time, I find myself, writing the end of the article. The body, which I had written, it had variety of thoughts, ideas and experiences all completely random, but somehow cohesive to one another. As I write the last sentence of the article, I realize one another thing, I forget to give a title. I think it would be appropriate to leave a blank space, at the place where I would be writing the title. It would be UNTITLED.

On the 6th of Jan 5 months ago I turned 20, I would like to take this opportunity to write about my journey as a child to a young adult. Until now, I have changed my residence about 5 or 6 times and not to mention the number of schools I have changed. The city where I live now, is not the city where I was born, that city is completely different. Moreover the place where I spent my early childhood years is different from the place where I spent my early teens. I always wondered how people feel when they live in the city where they are born, because I am completely alien to that feeling. All in all, I feel no longing for any place, because the place where I’m now maybe be the place where I might not be few years from now. When you change places or cities so frequently, you don’t actually have a constant group of friends, they always change as you move from one place to another.

As far as I can remember I’m used to spending time alone, not that I can’t make friends, but the high that I get exploring things on my own is a different experience altogether. Whenever people ask me about where I was from, the question automatically turns to why did you change cities. I’m tired of giving people explanation for such trivial things. But this is my journey through this 20 years, I can say that for all these years I have lived a life of nomad. I have no affiliated group of friends because they always change, but one thing that I don’t feel is the sense of belonging to a place. This feeling is missing in my head, whenever I hear people say that we are going to move to a different city, they make a huge fuzz of it, they talk about how they are going to miss their friends, for me I’m like “meh, that’s fine let’s see what this city has to offer to me”. Since I have this missing gene for a sense of belonging, I have this highly evolved ability to adjust to my surrounding. All those people who are always changing cities will get this feeling. But we nomads develop this ability to explore the place where we stay, because that might not be where we will be in a next couple of years.

As I near the final days of being not a graduate, it is clear to me that for my higher education I’m definitely going to change cities or maybe states. In all this I learned one thing, adapt to your new surroundings and the transition will be much easier. As I have said before for people like me, we know the true meaning of change is the only constant, because literally for us that is TRUE. Sometimes life wants you to learn certain lessons, way before you are aware of your conscience. Maybe the life of nomad was the ultimate way of life telling me that YOU ARE BORN FOR THIS. 🙂

On a bright and hot summer evening after cycling, I saw this amazing mother nature’s creation- banyan leaf. I took a lot of photographs of that leaf in various angles, and this is one of the photograph. As I took photograph of that perfect leaf it was getting pretty late and I had to go home.From the place where I cycle, my home is about 4km so it is a long way back, so I had to leave. When this time came I felt really bad to leave that perfect leaf in the place where I found it, I felt wildly attached to it, and I thought that I should take it home, but I resisted that temptation, temptation to take it back home. That is the most basic human sentiment to take any nature’s creation to our house to store it and preserve it. I left that leaf in a spot so that nobody would find it, because I didn’t want anybody to take it and damage it. It reminds me of the time when we were naive and completely new to this real world. At that point of time we are free from any injuries or scars from this real world, we are like this leaf – perfect, unscarred and free from any deformity. But as we go on in this world, we experience some things that change our perspective about this world, it changes our attitude of taking on this world. We become more and more pessimist, rather we become more and more realist and at the same time we lose our nativity.

This is the photograph which I took of that banyan tree leaf!

(Banyan Tree Leaf viewpoint!!)

A fresh leaf which falls from a tree is green and free from any injuries, but as it spends more and more time on the ground in contact with Earth it starts decomposing, decolorizing and loses its perfect state, that is it loses its naivity. But we should remember one thing, the way we become scarred or rather realist matters. We can do it gracefully or we can do it in a bad way and unhealthy way. If we do it in a right way, we become a optimistic realist or we end up hurting the people that we love and care about. Our final destination is the end of time, but the journey that we undertake to that place differs according to each person. Doing it the right way makes us a wise man, and doing it the other way makes us a scarred soldier, this all depends upon you and your attitude. In the end, we have to lose our nativity but the way we lose it distinguishs one person from another

As I was swapping channels on my TV I coincidentally came upon this amazing movie named Forrest Gump. It is a story of a specially abled man how despite all the problems he goes about to lead an inspiring life where he goes to fight the Vietnam war, returns triumphantly, and then goes about to take an adventure where he runs the whole of america for 3 continuous years. It also narrates how this mans life goes about to influence the life of his army lieutenant Dan, his childhood sweetheart jenny and his best friend Bubba. I’m NOT going to review this but I wanted to write an article about it because I was inspired by it. The movie is a light hearted, at the same time it made me cringe. It consolidates a simple concept in our life which we normally forget as we grow old. The concept of honesty and sincerity in work and also to work not for returns but for the fun of it. In our life we tend to work because we want the world to see us, celebrate us for the talent we possess. We forget that some things have to be done sincerely because we make promises to our dear ones. It particularly helps me remind that we have to do certain things for the fun of it and NOT for fame.

One of the greatest quotes this film has made

Our parents teach us this simple lessons but as we grow up we forget that. It also told me an another interesting thing- No job is small and all jobs share an equal importance. Home is one place you should never forget, the ideals our parent teach are very important and we should hold them as long as we are alive. Forrest Hump runs for 3 continuous years(resting only for food and sleep) not for fame but for the sake of it, and goes about to change and inspire people all over America and also the entire world. Hard work and sincerity should be our sole principles in life. He goes about to change the life of his former army lieutenant Dan who is disheartened because he is crippled during war but Forrest gump saves his life during war and changes him completely. Live your life for the fun of it and to inspire others and remember to save them during their dire times.